Book publications since 2008

Book publications since 2008

Voters and Voting in Context

Voters and Voting in Context investigates the role of context in affecting political opinion formation and voting behaviour. Building on a model of contextual effects on individual-level voter behaviour, the chapters of this volume explore contextual effects in Germany in the early twenty-first century.

The volume draws upon manifold combinations of individual and contextual information gathered in the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) framework and employ advanced methods. In substantive terms, it investigates the impact of campaign communication on political learning, effects of media coverage on the perceived importance of political problems, and the role of electoral competition on candidate strategies and perceptions. It also examines the role of social and economic contexts as well as parties' policy stances in affecting electoral turnout. The volume explores the impact of social cues on candidate voting, effects of electoral arenas on vote functions, the role of media coverage on ideological voting, and effects of campaign communication on the timing of electoral decision-making.

Voters and Voting in Context demonstrates the key role of the processes of communication and politicization in bringing about contextual effects. Context thus plays a nuanced role in voting behaviour. The contingency of contextual effects suggests that they will become an important topic in research on political behaviour and democratic politics.

Voters on the Move or on the Run?

This volume addresses electoral change, the reasons, and the consequences. By investigating heterogeneity of voting, and complexity of voting and its context the contributions show that increasing heterogeneity is not arbitrary and unstructured. Heterogeneity of voting rather is a way of voters dealing with the increasing complexity of the context of elections – diversified social structures, increasing differentiation of political supply, increasing complexity of the information environment. By analyzing the conditions of heterogeneity and showing that the calculus of voting becomes more and more conditional in terms of what voters regard as relevant criteria for vote choice, the chapters demonstrate that the new feature of electoral behavior is structured heterogeneity. The dimensions of differentiation of the electorate are cognitive capacity and the structure of individual information acquisition systems. The analyses underline that voters are on the move looking for appropriate answers to new complexities rather than on the run. The book uses data predominantly from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), and also comparative data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). Cross-sectional analysis is complemented by long- and short-term dynamic analyses with panel data, and comparative analyses.

Challenging the State: Devolution and the Battle for Partisan Credibility

A Comparison of Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Comparative Politics

How do state parties react to the challenge of peripheral parties demanding political power to be devolved to their culturally distinct territories? Is devolution the best response to these demands? Why do national governments implement devolution given the high risk that devolution will encourage peripheral parties to demand ever more devolved powers? The aim of this book is to answer these questions through a comparative analysis of devolution in four European countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The author argues that electoral competition between state and peripheral parties pushes some state parties to prefer devolution at some particular point in time. Devolution is an electoral strategy adopted in order to make it more difficult in the long term for peripheral parties to increase their electoral support by claiming the monopoly of representation of the peripheral territory and the people in it. The strategy of devolution is preferred over short-term tactics of convergence towards the peripheral programmatic agenda because the pro-periphery tactics of state parties in unitary centralised states are not credible in the eyes of voters. The price that state parties pay for making their electoral tactics credible is the 'entrenchment' of the devolution programmatic agenda in the electoral arena. The final implication of this argument is that in democratic systems devolution is not a decision to protect the state from the secessionist threat. It is, instead, a decision by state parties to protect their needed electoral majorities.

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Author

Sonia Alonso

Edition / place / publisher

Oxford: Oxford University Press

ISBN 978-0-19-969157-9

288 pages

£ 50,00

Verfassungswandel im Mehrebenensystem

Constitutions define a society’s basic rules and norms. They spell out the rights protecting the individual against the state and other citizens and establish institutions and processes of the state’s structure. Adaptations and other changes that constitutions undergo thus have great political and social relevance. Taking Germany’s Basic Law as an example, this volume presents a conceptual framework for systematically studying the ways in which explicit and implicit constitutional change comes about, what role the European and subnational levels play in the federal structure of the German state, and which specific actors promote such change or slow it down. A concluding review of the chapters addresses the delicate balance between providing for necessary flexibility in constitutional law and venturing the attendant possibility of losing internal coherence.

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Editors

Christoph Hönnige, Sascha Kneip, Astrid Lorenz

Edition / place / publisher

Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften

ISBN 978-3-531-15617-0

414 pages

€ 49,95

The Future of Representative Democracy

The Future of Representative Democracy poses important questions about representation, representative democracy and their future. Inspired by the last major investigation of the subject by Hanna Pitkin over four decades ago, this ambitious volume fills a major gap in the literature by examining the future of representative forms of democracy in terms of present-day trends and past theories of representative democracy. Aware of the pressing need for clarifying key concepts and institutional trends, the volume aims to break down barriers among disciplines and to establish an interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars. The contributors emphasise that representative democracy and its future is a subject of pressing scholarly concern and public importance. Paying close attention to the unfinished, two-centuries-old relationship between democracy and representation, this book offers a fresh perspective on current problems and dilemmas of representative democracy and the possible future development of new forms of democratic representation.

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Editors

Sonia Alonso, John Keane, Wolfgang Merkel (Eds.)

Edition / place / publisher

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

ISBN 978-1-10-700356-9

328 pages

$ 32,99

Zwischen Langeweile und Extremen: Die Bundestagswahl 2009

Wahlen in Deutschland, Bd. 1

Voter turnout in the 2009 elections for Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, was the weakest on record, and they were dominated by extremes. Together, the two major parties garnered fewer votes than ever before, with the SPD hitting a historical nadir. By contrast, the FDP, the Greens, and the Left posted their best returns yet. The elections were also characterized by a surge in ballot-splitting and in the number of swing voters. The authors of this volume look into the reasons for these results. They give a comprehensive overview of the background and unusual features of these Bundestag elections, which followed a governing coalition consisting of the CDU/CSU and the SPD and which was overshadowed by global economic crisis. The book focuses on analyses of the election campaign, voting behavior, and the decisions the voters made.

Handbuch Arbeitgeber- und Wirtschaftsverbände in Deutschland

Employer and business associations are mainstays in the German economic model and figure in a host of political decisions undertaken with the state, unions, and other interest organizations. Such associations organize the collective behavior of economic competitors and try to articulate, represent, and successfully assert their common interests against those of other governmental and social actors. The handbook takes stock of current research on the complex landscape of German business associations. The first part of the volume treats the history and functions of the employer and business associations; the second part, their organization and structure. The third part presents an examination of how these associations are embedded in their political and social context, including their relationship to the unions. The fourth part is about the positioning of business associations in collective bargaining policy, social policy, and environmental policy and about what the associations understand social partnership to be. The fifth and final part concentrates on the international setting and the consequences that the internationalization of governance has for the Europeanization and work of the associations. The book’s unifying theme is the fundamental question about how employer and business associations are responding to the changed environmental conditions they face and to their own internal processes of change, all of which are testing the German model of the social market economy.

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Editors

Wolfgang Schroeder, Bernhard Weßels

Edition / place / publisher

Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften

ISBN 978-3-531-14195-4

552 pages

€59,95

Social Democracy in Power

Routledge Research in Comparative Politics

Globalization, European integration, and social change have devaluated traditional social democratic policy instruments. This book compares and explores how social democratic governments have had to adapt and whether they have successfully managed to uphold old social democratic goals and values in the light of these challenges. The volume examines the policy measures of social democratic parties in government in a comparative framework. The authors focus on traditional social democratic goals and tools, in particular, fiscal, employment, and social policy, in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark. They identify three policy patterns in social democratic governments: traditional, modernized, and liberalized social democracy and provide a comparative account of the explanatory power of the national context for policy adopted by social democratic parties. Although in some cases differences in policy and performance between the six governments correspond to the programmatic position of the social democratic party, they are primarily attributable - in this order - to the specific structure of national party competition, to the behaviour of trade unions, and to institutional veto points.

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Author

Wolfgang Merkel, Alexander Petring, Christian Henkes, Christoph Egle

Edition / place / publisher

London/New York: Routledge

ISBN 978-0-415-43820-9

336 pages

£ 75.00

War and Democratization: Legality, Legitimacy and Effectiveness

Democratization, Vol. 15, No. 3, Special Issue, June 2008

Promotion of democracy in post-war and post-conflict societies became a hot topic during the 1990s. External actors linked their peace-building efforts to the promotion of democracy. Four modes of promotion of democracy by external actors can be distinguished: (1) enforcing democratization by enduring post-war occupation; (2) restoring an elected government by military intervention; (3) intervening in on-going massacres and civil war with military forces ("humanitarian intervention") and thereby curbing the national sovereignty of those countries; and (4) forcing democracy on rogue states by "democratic intervention", in other words, democracy through war. In this special issue we consider the legality, legitimacy, and effectiveness of the four modes where the international community of states not only felt impelled to engage in military humanitarian or peace-building missions but also in long-term state- and democracy-building. All cases analysed here suggest that embedding democratization in post-war and post-conflict societies entails a comprehensive agenda of political, social, and economic methods of peace-building. If external actors withdraw before the roots of democracy are deep enough and before democratic institutions are strong enough to stand alone, then the entire endeavour may fail.

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Author

Sonja Grimm, Wolfgang Merkel (Eds.)

Edition / place / publisher

Milton Park, UK/New York: Routledge

ISSN 1351-0347

226 pages

£ 15.00

Verfassungsgerichte als demokratische Akteure

Constitutional courts are powerful actors in nearly all liberal democracies. But there are frequent doubts that they are consistent with democracy when they intervene in democratic processes, for the democratic legitimacy of constitutional courts is comparatively weak. The author analyzes the specific functions that these institutions perform in democratic systems of government and empirically answers the question about the democratic compatibility of constitutional courts. The book focuses on disputes between federal and state government, between organs, and between contending procedures for monitoring standards. The author concludes that constitutional courts need not be antagonists of democratic politics at all and that, as shown by the Federal Republic of Germany, they can even be constitutive for democratic governance. Based on thorough analysis of the rulings handed down by the German Federal Constitutional Court from 1951 to, this study shows that the highest court in the land has been exceedingly conducive to democracy and has thereby contributed to its high quality in the Federal Republic of Germany.

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Author

Sascha Kneip

Edition / place / publisher

Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft

ISBN 978-3-8329-4062-1

375 pages

€ 49,00

Wahlen und Wähler

This book is the latest volume in a series presenting internationally relevant results of Germany's national elections and of empirical research on elections and voters since 1980. One of the special aspects of Germany's 2005 national election is that it was moved forward because of parliament's early dissolution when the federal chancellor lost a vote of no confidence. The first part of the book contains contributions on the political background of this election, the course of the campaign, east - west differences in voter behavior, shifts in voter allegiance, and effects of the issues and the candidates. Given the recurring and particularly heated debates in 2005 on the reliability of election forecasts, the present volume explores the topic from the academic and commercial perspectives of election research. In the second part of the book, survey and experimental data serve as a basis for treatment of traditional and new questions of election research. The analyses center mostly on long-term trends and regional facets of voter behavior in Germany. The third part addresses international trends and elections in other European democracies.

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Author

Oscar W. Gabriel, Bernhard Weßels, Jürgen W. Falter (Hg.)

Edition / place / publisher

Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften

ISBN 978-3-531-16413-7

627 pages

€ 49,90

Reformen in Wohlfahrtsstaaten

To cast light on the factors determining government action, the author conducts a comparative study of the measures taken by 18 OECD countries to reform pension and social insurance from 1980 to 2002. The interest centers on the questions of whether there are specific constellations that encourage or discourage reforms, which roles the participating actors play, and what the significance is of political institutions such as majority and proportional suffrage, federalism and centralism, and unicameral and bicameral systems. The empirical findings show that neither the type of democracy nor the urgency of a given problem directly influences reform activity in welfare state regimes. Although political institutions do constitute a limiting or facilitating framework for political decision-making, the crucial part is the actors, that is, the governments and the parties on which they are built. The way in which the action space is used depends on the specific constellations of actors - single-party or multiparty government and the number of coalition partners.

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Author

Alexander Petring

Edition / place / publisher

Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften

ISBN 978-3-531-17313-9

244 pages

€ 39,95

Systemtransformation

This book provides the first systematic introduction to political science transformation research. It also offers extensive empirical analyses of democratization since 1945 and systemic changes in southern Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe. In the first, theoretical part of the book, the author spells out criteria that permit a clear conceptual grasp and delineation of political governance. They apply to democracy, autocracy, government, regime, state, and system alike. With this framework in mind, the author outlines the major phases of transformation from autocratic to democratic political systems and systematically interrelates the dynamics of their structures and actors. In the book's second section - the empirical analysis of four major regional waves of transformation - the theoretical concepts are applied to the democratization of Germany, Italy, and Japan after 1945, the right-wing dictatorships of southern Europe (Portugal, Greece, and Spain) after 1974, the capitalist autocracies of East Asia (the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and Thailand) in the mid-1980s, and the communist systems of eastern Europe after 1989.

Erzwungene Demokratie

In supervising the consolidation of peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the international community of states is exporting constitutional democracy as a model and intervening deeply in the internal affairs of states. Can democracy be compelled? This volume presents the first systematic investigation ever conducted on the legality, legitimacy, and effectiveness of external democratization from 1945 to the present. The author points out the central dilemmas of promoting democracy in postwar societies. The study centers on the external supervision in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the international transitional administration in Kosovo, the multilateral supervision in Afghanistan, and the U.S. occupation in Iraq. An astute review of West Germany's transformation under Allied occupation rounds out the analysis. The research shows that the dilemmas of external democratization are all but insoluble and that the successes are limited.